Print
Email
Shareby Lee Weston Sabo
Bright Lights Film Journal (February 2010)
“Despite their roots in a centuries-old tradition of Jewish humorists (and their surname), there is a surprising lack of explicit Jewishness in the Coens’ films. They do, however, still treat their characters with as much cynicism and anxious distance as more obviously Jewish comic filmmakers like Woody Allen do, which has led many critics — sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly — to call them condescending. It’s easy — too easy — to imagine these two Jewish brothers scoffing at the idiotic Gentiles that populate their films, smugly robbing stylistic techniques from the more profound storytellers they studied in film school, and dismiss them as crass, sadistic snobs.”
